I feel now as though I’ve been sitting all my life inside a box, and suddenly someone is lifting the lid and I can look up and see the stars.
We are the wise. Do not envy us – We who are too wise to draw near the fire Lest we get burned; We who are too wise to love Lest love should vanish and we be hurt. We are the wise. Do not envy us our wisdom – We who are too wise to live Lest we should die.
If there were a mile high mountain of granite, and once every ten-thousand years a bird flew past and brushed it with a feather, by the time that mountain was worn away, a fraction of a second would have passed in the context of eternity.
Writers ‘get started’ the day they are born. The minds they bring into the world with them are the amazing machines their stories will come out of, and the more they feed into it, the richer those stories will be.
Sit down every day and DO IT. Writing is a self-taught craft; the more you work at it, the more skilled you become. And when you’re not writing, READ.
Life continues, and we all of us keep changing and building, toward what we cannot know.
People do not spring forth out of the blue, fully formed – they become themselves slowly, day by day, starting from babyhood. They are the result of both environment and heredity, and your fictional characters, in order to be believable, must be also.
December is a month that is rife with nostalgia. If there’s anything deep in your heart that you want to keep buried, you can count on December to bring it to the surface.
The best things in life are simple. Simple things work. They don’t foul up. It’s the complicated things that get twisted around on you.
She leaned over the bed to plant a goodbye kiss on his cheek. Instead he reached up and cupped her head in his left hand, so that he was in charge of her kiss and it landed oh his lips. It was not, as she would have expected, the fumbling kiss of a boy unused to dating but the practiced kiss of a man who knew exactly what he was doing.
Today the average lifetime is over seventy years, long enough for a great number of accomplishments. But this development has occurred within the present century. Before that, people tended to die much younger than they do today, and among those early deaths were those of many brilliant and talented people who had much to give the world. It is those people to whom I reach out. It is to them I offer the opportunity to return.
The silence was gone now, and the night was filled with voices – a chirp, a growl, a twitter – a burst of high-pitched laughter.
Many of the kids coming into my classes at the university are all but illiterate. You give them a page to read and they can’t tell you what’s on it. Try teaching them the classics, and they can’t pronounce the words. Ask them to write about something, and they can’t make complete sentences – much less spell anything over two syllables.
Girls like her are a dime a dozen, and I happen to have a pocket full of dimes.
By the time they’re in college, it’s gone too far. They’ve had twelve years without disciplined learning and they don’t know how to apply themselves. They haven’t learned to study or to pace their work so that projects get completed on time. They fall asleep in lectures because they expect to be entertained not educated.